Price

A price is made up of: a currency code, a price amount, whether it is including or excluding tax, and, optionally, a set of dates the price is effective from and to. A price also has a status, used in ONIX transmission.

Price configuration

Currency codes and their corresponding including or excluding tax designations are determined at a company level, and are set up by contacting us directly.

ONIX Price statuses

The ONIX standards allows one of three price statuses to be attached to a price.

• Unspecified: the default, used if no status is supplied
• Provisional: the price may change
• Firm: the price is not expected to change

As well as informing the supply chain of the likelihood of a future price change, this attribute can also be used to help your own workflow.

For example, early in the lifecycle of book development a price point of £14.99 may be chosen based on the expected print run size, print technology, sale quantity, and product features (e.g. the presence of a colour plate section). Changes to these later in the development may force a reassessment of the price. In acknowledgement of this, it may be wise to set a price status of ‘Provisional’ in the early development stages, and to define a decision point later on at which the prices will be reviewed, possibly modified, and set to ‘Firm’.

This change will be broadcast via ONIX to the supply chain, allowing potential buyers more confidence in placing orders.

Controlling the price status at different levels

Although the status is an attribute of each price set, control the status of all prices on a product or a work through a single field.

Set a price status not only for an individual price, but also for the product or the work, if desired.

The status on a price is determined by that of the price first of all, unless it is ‘Unspecified’. If it is ‘Unspecified’, then the product price status is next considered, and will be adopted if it is ‘Firm or Provisional’. If the product status is ‘Unspecified’, Consonance uses the work status.

Various scenarios are explained below.

Status set for prices only

Here the prices themselves have individual statuses of Firm or Provisional, and the product and work statuses will be ignored.

Status set for products only

The prices have individual statuses of Unspecified, so the status set on the product is then considered.

Status set for work only

The prices and the products have statuses of Unspecified, so the status set on the work is then considered.

Status set for work, over-ridden for one product

The prices have individual statuses of Unspecified, and the hardback has a status of Unspecified, so prices on the hardback are defined by the price status on the work, and are therefore Provisional.

The price status on the paperback product is Firm, and this has a higher priority that the Provisional status of the work.

Status set for work, over-ridden for one price

All prices are defined to be Provisional by the work, except that for the hardback £ price which is Firm.

Although a status is an attribute of individual prices, a single price value of USD7.99 could have different statuses in different territories. For example, the price may be regarded as Firm for the US market, but Provisional for the South American market. This functionality is not currently supported by Consonance, but do let us know if it is of interest.

Default price status for new records

New works, products, and prices are currently created with a default price status of Unspecified. Please let us know if you’d like a change in that behaviour.

Change price or price statuses

There are two areas for editing prices and price statuses.

Price bulk edit page

The Bibliographic > Prices dashboard ⤴ shows one row per product and all defined prices. Edit the price or the price status directly in the table here.

Because the products are by default ordered from newest to oldest, this also makes a good page for reviewing the statuses of prices for forthcoming products.

Work metadata page

The work and product price statuses are both available in the prices section. To set the status of an individual price, click the dropdown on the work metadata price table.